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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The Devils are only two games into the second half of their schedule, but they believe they need to start to make a push for the playoffs now.

Sure, they did a decent job of recovering from going 0-4-3 in their first seven games and 1-5-4 in their first 10. They were able to reach NHL .500 at 8-8-5 by the 21-game mark, though, with a 4-3 overtime win in Anaheim on Nov. 20 that also moved them into an Eastern Conference playoff spot.

A 2-1 overtime win in Los Angeles the next night got them over .500 for the first time. Over the month and a half since then, however, they’ve been bouncing up and down and unable to firmly establish themselves in a postseason position or on the positive side of the break-even mark.

The Devils (17-18-8) are on a downswing again and four points out of a playoff spot after consecutive losses to Chicago (5-3) and Buffalo (2-1), which places even more importance on Tuesday night’s home game against the Philadelphia Flyers – one of the teams they are chasing in the Metropolitan Division.

It’s the opener of a three-game homestand that also includes visits from Dallas on Thursday and Florida on Saturday before they begin Sunday a four-game road trip to Toronto, Montreal, Colorado and Phoenix.

“It’s a huge week,” Devils coach Pete DeBoer said. “We’ve termed this kind of a moving week for us, almost like a Saturday at the Masters. It’s time that we start making a move here and we’ve got to have that mindset.”

“This is a big game tomorrow,” center Travis Zajac said. “Obviously, they’re ahead of us in the standings and we’ve got to beat those teams just above us to give ourselves a chance of getting closer and closer. It’s going to be a tough game. They’re playing well recently and we’ll have to just make sure we’re ready when the puck drops and we’re ready to battle and find that edge and find that confidence to get our game back.”

A win over the Flyers seems almost essential considering the Devils will probably have to finish ahead of them to make the playoffs. But the Devils have demonstrated an ability to get up and win big games before – i.e. their 2-1 win over Pittsburgh a week ago – and then sag afterward.

So, they know they can’t be satisfied with only playing well against the Flyers.

“We’ve got to start the playoff mode right away,” said Martin Brodeur, who will start in net Friday. “It’s important we treat every single game the same and not because it’s one (opponent) or the other. We need to make a good push here before the (Olympic) break and get ourselves in a better position than we’re in.

“We’ll play teams that are around us (in the standings), so many of them, that these games are magnified. They call them those four-point games or whatever, but they’re going to be important. There’s a big one tomorrow.”

The Devils have held a playoff spot (either solely or by tiebreaker) for only five days this season. They’ve seen the Flyers make a similar recovery from a poor start and cruise past them in the standings.

The Flyers are 8-1-2 in their last 11 games and 17-7-3 since going 4-10-1 in their first 15 games. This is definitely a much different team than the one that the Devils beat 3-0 on Nov. 7 in Philadelphia. At the time, Flyers captain Claude Giroux was still looking for his first goal of the season.

Now, he’s got 12 goals and 26 assists for 38 points in 42 games this season.

“You look at the game they played the other night in Phoenix, they’re down going into third and Giroux, (Wayne) Simmonds and (Jakub) Voracek score in the third period,” DeBoer said. “So, their big guys are delivering right now.”

Right wing Jaromir Jagr noted the Devils were also playing pretty well with a 5-1-1 surge before losing their last two.

“I feel like if you take (the last) two games away, we’re playing pretty good hockey too,” Jagr said. “It’s just Chicago is tough to play. We were close. It was 4-3. We just made bad plays.”

Saturday’s loss to last-overall Buffalo was equally frustrating, but for different reasons.

“I thought Chicago was ripe to be beat,” Zajad said. “Buffalo actually played a tough game. They were tough at home. We played well, but we didn’t do enough to win. That’s basically it. We didn’t get enough chances. We have to do more offensively to create a little more.”

It was just an unfortunate game for us,” Brodeur said. “We didn’t play bad, but we didn’t play good enough to put them away at any time in the game. It’s hard. I didn’t play the game. So, when you sit back looking at it, it was like, ‘We’ll give you one chance. We’ll take one.’ It was minimal on both sides the chances and the special teams prevailed and they scored one more than us.”

About

TOM GULITTI has covered the New Jersey Devils for The Record since 2002. Prior to that, he covered the New York Rangers for four years. Gulitti joined The Record in 1998 after six years at The North Jersey Herald News. He graduated from Binghamton University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric-Literature.